Mom read in the living room. Cars hummed up and down the street. I felt like a drop of blood, all surface tension. I felt like the deer heart the hunter presented to the evil stepmother instead of Snow White’s. I would always be the flea-bitten deer whose heart gets chopped out to save Snow White, I thought to myself. And maybe that was okay. Maybe that was worth it. In my dreams, I saved an old lady from a bathroom stall again and again.
I shivered and shivered. Mom came and went from work.
Wrapped up on the couch with a fever, exempt from all duties of life. Was there anywhere safer in the world?
104
ON THE FIFTH DAY MOM CAME home from work early. I was frozen solid. Several times I told myself to greet her, but somehow I ended up asleep before the “Hi, Mom” came out. I remembered and forgot and fell asleep, woke, remembered, forgot, until she woke me herself, lowering herself to the floor beside me.
“Annabeth,” she said. “I think you should try to sit up for a while.”
I shifted on the couch. Every time I moved, snow packed into the newly exposed parts of my body. I sat up with difficulty, my teeth chattering.
Mom was holding a big envelope. “Look what came,” she said.
She handed it to me. The front of the envelope said CONGRATULATIONS. The return address said NORTHERN UNIVERSITY.
I wept while Mom called Nan and Uncle Dylan. I wept while she called Pauline to tell her the news. I wept until I felt her arms lift me up and carry me, too easily, to bed.
105
WHEN I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL on Monday, grass was showing through the snow in damp green patches. The sun looked like a scrambled egg. At some point in the week I was gone, the school had received the projectors that were supposed to arrive in September as part of a Technology in the Classrooms grant. In class, the teachers mostly fussed with them while we sat bathed in cancerous blue light.
Sphinx Lacoeur had gotten fired, or almost fired, after Ms. Bomtrauer had called Gailer College to complain about the questionable health advice he was giving impressionable young gymnasts—I never got the whole story. The gym birds were up in arms over the injustice. You could see them twittering and puffing in the halls, skinny hips cocked, arms folded.
Noe had started to wear a tiny gold cross on a fine chain. You could barely make out its glimmer around her neck. She carried around a thick book called Foucault’s Pendulum and a pink travel mug with GAILER COLLEGE embossed on the side.
Margot Dilforth had shocked everyone by making out with another girl at a St. Patrick’s Day party. Now they were walking around the halls arm in arm. I had never seen Margot Dilforth looking radiant before. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Now she glowed.
At lunch, I went to the nutritionist’s office, knocked, and walked in. He was knitting a green-and-white dog sweater and had a new audiobook playing. I saw the CD case on his desk: Entering Mist.
The way to Master Tung’s house was up the twelve-peaked mountain . . .
Bob didn’t bother to scramble for the stop button. He set his knitting down, leaned forward, and gently clicked the player off.
“Annabeth,” he said. “What a surprise.”
I tossed a small blue notebook onto his desk and plunked myself onto the creaky plastic chair.
“I was thinking we could start over,” I said.
He picked up the notebook and flipped through it. As he read through the columns, he began to sit up straighter. When he looked back at me, there was something like confidence in his face. He cleared his throat and adjusted the collar on his shirt.
“So, Annabeth. How long have you had trouble eating?” he said.
106
I WASN’T TRYING TO STARVE MYSELF. I was just too sad to eat.
Bob said that happened sometimes, when people got stressed.
He said the main thing was learning to feel good again.
“What would make you feel good?” he said.
I didn’t have an answer for that, so mostly we ate Cheez-Its and listened to Entering Mist.
107
I STARTED GOING BY BOB’S OFFICE now and then when I got hungry. He kept a cardboard box full of trail mix packets outside the door. I felt like a bird visiting a bird feeder throughout the winter. I started making detours to go past the box throughout the day. Sometimes I was afraid it would be empty, but it never was. I tore into the packets as I hurried away, and inhaled the nuts and seeds so fast I couldn’t taste them.
108
ONE DAY, STEVEN CAUGHT ME PAWING through the trail mix box. I jerked away guiltily. We were the only two people in the hall.
“Annabeth,” he said, and I bolted like a deer, unable to make myself look back.
After that, there were sometimes chocolate éclairs in the box, and sometimes chili garlic peanuts, and sometimes neatly wrapped bowls of spinach-mushroom ravioli.
Somehow, I was always able to eat the things that came from Steven, as if the charm of friendship was the one thing powerful enough to overcome the curse of the Stone King.
109
SPRING BREAK WAS COMING UP. STEVEN was going to Connecticut with his mom to visit his dying grandpa. In Art, I made a PEE SISTERS badge for him and sewed it into the sleeve of his sweater, just above the wrist. When he saw what I had done, he got to work on a badge for me. When we walked out, we both had neon-green hearts hidden under our cuffs. Before splitting up at the end of the hall, I gave him a big hug.
“Take good care of your grandpa,” I said, before slipping away.
110
THE LAST TIME I HUNG OUT in Bob’s office before the break, we got to the part in Entering Mist where Wu goes to stay with a band of forest monks who rely on magical tree energy to stay alive. The tree energy is called “nwiffer,” and the monks absorb it by being somewhere green.
When we got to that part in the audiobook, I blurted, “I used to be like that.”
“Like what?” said Bob.
“Full of nwiffer.”
As I said it, I remembered a time before the monster. The feeling started in my toes and spread upward, a pale green leaping. I remembered the hush of wind in the treetops, and the striking red of Mom’s hat against the leaves. I remembered gazing at the mirror in my vain moments, so pleased with myself. So certain of my own valor. So certain.
Bob said that my task for spring break was to get some nwiffer, and if I happened to eat more that would be a bonus.
I spent the week walking all the old trails, letting the green feeling spread from my toes to my ankles to my knees. I sat by the river and listened to the water until my body seemed to disappear in the sound. I thought about everything that had happened that year, from the first morning of school, to the moment Oliver and I began to kiss in the orchid house, to the abortion, to the gym meet, and everything in between. As the memories rose to my mind, they seemed to flow through me and disappear with each new swirl in the river. Maybe this was what life was, just this: one big ripple. I could live with that. I could let it go on and on.
In the evenings, Mom and I pored over the course catalog that Northern had sent, and talked on the phone with Ava and Pauline. Mom was thinking about going back to school to be a paramedic; one day her own fat envelope came in the mail, and we pored over that instead.